“Make them pay.” Tess shook her head. The vertigo subsided. She headed back to the car.

“Make them pay,” she repeated, gripping the steering wheel.

END. (188 WORDS)

Blurred OutBy J.J. Sinisi

There was no opportunity in Brazil. Stuffed in a duffel bag for the flight, I promised myself I’d bite through my wrists for a chance at revenge.

Their drugs constrict my vision, but I know this place, the people. And it makes sense, doesn’t it? Crystal’s here. Of course Chicago’s the last stop.

“Keep moving,” the thug says. They left their guns in Salvador. Private planes still have to submit to screenings. They’ll re-arm back outside.

There’re enough people to lose them, leave them here on the automated walkway. But that puts Crystal in jeopardy.

Sure, I admit to my ghosts, Crystal’s a dancer, she’s always in trouble. But I’m her sister. And I won’t let a little thing like a decade of regret get in the way of saving her ass.

One eyes the TSA agents, the other on his phone. I’ll need to beat them to Crystal’s apartment.

Cackling South-loopers, a perfect cover. The sun-glassed one stares at a short skirt. My heeled boot grinds his patella, buckling his leg. I stomp his fallen phone. The second, a fat man whose biceps resist his suit’s plea for subtly, goes for a bear hug. My knee to his groin. His phone I steal before hopping the handrail.

Running blind, I realize I don’t even know Crystal’s number.

​Hell of a start to the night.

END. (225 WORDS)

The Infestation of YouthBy J.J. Sinisi

It was in Marseille, he said, all those deaths, thousands and thousands shriveling the town like a raisin. She hadn’t considered it until just then, standing on the pier with him, their hands inches apart, their minds further still.

“The plague, spread from those merchant ports to all over Europe.”

“Seems appropriate.” She wiped her nose. A cold slip of wind burned her cheeks. She let the duffel bag drop from her hand.

Somewhere behind them sirens, a growing chorus of inevitability.

Puffiness, less a swelling than inflation, crowded around his left eye until she knew he saw little but the brightest reflections off the water. That cop was a hard man. Hard men don’t die easily.

“Ever feel like we were the plague? Let loose on a world that never wanted us around in the first place?” She asked him, cocking the hammer back on her .22.

He inhaled, breathed in the question. “It was the rats, not the people. I never thought people were the problem. If anything, they’re the only answer we got.”

Skidding tires, megaphones, the cries of get down get down get down.

“It’s time Mrs. Williams.”

“I would’ve followed you to the end, Mr. Williams.” She put the gun to his temple.

“You already did.”

She pulled the trigger.

END. (215 WORDS)

Tunnel VisionBy J.J. Sinisi

I do wonder how they stack up, the decisions I’ve made to get here, helpless on the floor, life fleeing from my eyes the way I’ve fled from virtue, from you.

I don’t blame them, the men beating me. How can I?

“We ain’t gonna kill you,” one says, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t going to try.

It’s gambling, not that the vice matters to you. It never mattered to you. You saw it, rightly, as just one of a million possibilities, like stars in the sky, of how I’d bring it crashing down.

“You see that light? That’s the future. You ain’t going to see much more of it if you keep hedging,” he says.

I reach up, but I’m enfeebled, and my resistance is met with a stiff slap before the beating continues. I’m not going to lie; it reminds me a lot of our relationship.

Just because you said you wanted to help, didn’t mean you were willing to try.

​I close my eyes and hold that light, blinding but somehow dim, and take my beating as it’s served, worried less about me and more about you, just the way you’ve always wanted.

END. (197 Words)

Off The TracksBy J.J. Sinisi

​Put your money away, I say, it’s the least I can do.

You’re adorable in that skirt and frilly top. I’m so glad you’ll never know what it was like, men like Sonny commanding you, smooth baritone voices and promises of wealth.

​I can tell you’re not listening. When the F-Line streetcar screeches past, you tell me you like the trolleys down here. I don’t correct you; don’t see the point in angering you with semantics.

I did it because I was young and stupid, I continue to your muted ears, because girls in my time didn’t know the world, our fathers shielding us, our mothers teaching us shame before pride, San Francisco, all of America, in the forties.

For a moment, I think I’ve gotten through and you’re not distracted by the tourists, or the rising clock tower of the Farmer’s Market. But a pretty boy passes and I know I’ve lost you again, to puberty, to confidence, to modernity. If you were listening, you’d ask if I regretted it. No, I’d say. If it weren’t for the years in the factory, your mother, all of my pain; if it weren’t for Sonny, I couldn’t have bought you these oranges.

END. (201 Words)

March to the SeaBy J.J. Sinisi

Shanise remembered her great-grandmother’s story about the snow in Georgia, a decade removed from the civil war. God, she had recounted, finally awoke from His slumber to rub a balm on the blackened South. It blanketed the calamity that was Sherman and before the sun crested and melted into reality, the war hadn’t happened. The fields were pristine again.

“I think of that story every time it snows here.” Shanise said to John.

They stared out the twentieth floor windows. The wake wouldn’t start for another hour. They were dressed in their best blacks. She loved the contrast of their interlocking fingers.

“Lord knows what you see in this city that reminds you of that.”

“Nothing.” She shook her head, dispelled the rising tears in her throat. “Nothing at all. The filth takes over too fast here.”

“You know, it was the filth that took Tommy from us.”

The cabs rolled through the muddy slush, people ducked for cover. Shanise thought of The South and of destruction wrought, and realized Sherman had nothing on New York City’s streets. They’d burn forever. The snow hadn’t a chance.

​END.(186 Words)

Gentrifyby J.J. Sinisi

Gentrify (Uncensored)

The Volvo sent Tork over the edge. A fucking Volvo. Powell’s statue beside him, Tork knew from hell what all a Volvo had any business being north of 125.

Luckily, fifty years on and the cops still didn’t know discretion until it bit them in the ass. Who were they fooling with that tan sedan? Certaintly not Tork. That would help. Have to know the pigs before you cooked the bacon.

He’d wait for Daryl to come out. Smash him in the face with the pistol, grab the bag and take off down 7th towards projects on Frederick Douglass.

The gun was empty, but Daryl didn’t know that. Bastard was lucky Tork didn’t exact his revenge with a knife, or a sledge.

Old Ronnie G went out like that. Sledge to the skull. Maybe he should pay Daryl the same favor.

Na, a broken mouth and less a bag of cash, that’d be enough.

Daryl stepped out of the Ephesus Church. Tork gripped the pistol but Daryl was empty-handed. No brown bag, no drop. Just that dumb limp of his.

Fuck it.

Tork charged, Daryl’d pay, one way or the other.

​END.(193 Words)

C'Mon Up to the HouseBy J.J. Sinisi

We came to the house one last time in the early spring. The lake had nearly thawed, despite the early morning’s cold. Bella waited outside for me, hands in her thin coat, lollipop hanging from her lips. She was using them to replace the smokes, but the sugar just swapped one vice for another.

“What do you think?”

I rolled up the sleeves of my Oxford as we spoke. “You know he had this place built as his hideaway from the city.”

“Everyone knows that, Duke.”

“The hell you need to hideaway from Battlecreek I’ll never know.”

“The gig, Duke, the gig. What do you think of the gig?”I slid my hands into my pockets and Jimmy Parsens joined us but didn’t say anything.

“I think it’s dangerous. I’m prepared. Not sure everyone else is.”

“That include me?”

“Especially you.”

“Well screw you then.”

“No one ever said this business was easy for a girl.”

“It ain’t the fact that I’m a girl.” She cocked her head. “A woman. Not my problem you don’t know how to handle me.”

I looked at that lollipop, bobbing and weaving with her words.

​“On that, Bella, we agree.”

END.(196 Words)

​Ship of IceBy J.J. Sinisi

Pulling into port I saw her, that stoic floating bitch, slumped over the sea like a pregnant cow and realized how very screwed I was. The blue expanse of I90 reeled into the distance. I considered splashing through the drifting ice sheets, swimming to shore and carjacking the first hapless suit I could find.

“It ain’t that bad.” Morgan, by my side, dressed in green, like always.

The deckhands called him that because of his relation to the actor Morgan Freeman. I knew his real name but never used it. A man’s identity should be whatever he wants to make it.

“It looks impossible.”

“So did New Bedford. So did Stonington.” He was right. “You said you’d see it through.”

From my blood-caked knuckles, the razor wind sliced open my last vision of Tara. She was cold then too, frozen and alone.